Two Cheers for Ante-Communion!

A modest liturgical proposal

For many Anglican liturgists of the twentieth century, nothing represented the failure of historic Anglican liturgical practice more than the Ante-Communion service. The service is not well-know today, but it was the final part of the post-Reformation Anglican Sunday morning liturgy on those weeks which the Holy Communion was not celebrated. From Reformation to the late nineteenth century, Anglican morning worship began with Morning Prayer and the Litany, which together were often referred to as the ‘first service.’  Morning Prayer and the Litany were followed by the ‘second service’, either the full Communion service or, more often, the Ante-Communion. The Ante-Communion is, essentially, the first part of the Communion service, ending before the celebration of the Lord’s Supper proper. After the Prayer for the whole state of Christ’s church militant, the minister would pray a final collect and dismiss the congregation with a blessing rather than continue the Communion service.

Given that Communion was celebrated monthly or even quarterly in most Church of England parish churches, Ante-Communion was the most common conclusion of Sunday worship until the 1872 Shortened Services Act, which allowed Morning Prayer and (Ante-)Communion to be celebrated separately. This would eventually lead to Morning Prayer being used as the primary non-Communion Sunday worship service (a similar modification of Sunday worship occurred in the Protestant Episcopal Church (USA) in 1856). And, actually, this may understate its prevalence in the experience of the average parishioner: on Communion Sundays, non-communicants were dismissed after the Prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant (that is, after the Ante-Communion) and only those who actually intended to communion would come forward into the chancel for the Lord’s Supper proper.

For today’s critics, the Ante-Communion was a sort of ugly half-service betraying the Church of England’s sad neglect of the sacrament and poor liturgical sense. One popular narrative of the history of Anglican worship goes like this: for fifteen hundred years, the Eucharist was at the heart of Christian weekly worship. But due to good intentions gone awry, this focus was sadly lost at the Reformation. The Reformers objected not to weekly celebration of Communion – in fact, they largely endorsed it! – but to noncommunicating Eucharists at which only the priest communicated. However, emphasis in both late medieval and early modern Christianity on the danger of unworthily receiving the sacrament meant that laypeople were often discomfited by regular reception, which posed a problem given the Reformation rejection of noncommunicating Eucharists. Further, the Reformation focus on the Word made moving away from weekly celebration of the Eucharist seem possible. As a result, Communion came to become a rare event in the life of the Protestant churches.

According to this narrative, the error began to be corrected in Anglicanism with the rise of the Oxford Movement, which rightly held up the centrality of Holy Communion to the church’s weekly (and even daily) worship. However, in nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic churches, the principal Sunday service was often a noncommunicating Solemn High Mass at which only the priest (and perhaps the altar party) received. This meant that while the consecration of the bread and wine was rightly seen as central, the actual reception of the consecrated elements by the people was not. This finally came to be corrected with the rise of the Liturgical Movement and especially Parish Communion movement. This latter movement had at its motto ‘The Lord’s people around the Lord’s table on the Lord’s Day,’ and sought to restore the patristic model of a Holy Eucharist at which the people communicated as the Sunday service. And so, today, Anglican churches recognize that, as “Concerning the Service of the Church” in the 1979 US Book of Common Prayer puts it, the Eucharist is “the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts” – and this Eucharist is emphatically a communicating Eucharist, at which the congregation is invited to communicate, and almost everyone does so.

Given this story, it is unsurprising that the Ante-Communion has come in for poor treatment; its widespread use instead of the full Communion service comes to be seen as exemplifying the tragic Protestant marginalization of weekly Eucharist. But I wonder if this condemnation is entirely warranted – and specifically, I wonder whether an adaptation of the earlier Anglican model of Sunday worship, including the much-maligned Ante-Communion, might be helpful to address some of the challenges of Christian worship in an increasingly post-Christian culture. I want to be clear that this is not a call for a wooden mimicking of, say, 18^th c. Anglican practice. Nor is it a wholesale rejection of all developments in liturgical thinking or practice since then. There is a reason that this piece is entitled Two, rather than Three, Cheers for Ante-Communion. Specifically, while I think that there might be good reasons for some churches to experiment with less-than-weekly Communion, I do think that the restoration of more regular and indeed weekly celebrations of Holy Communion is generally a positive thing. But still, I think that the Ante-Communion might have things to teach us for framing Anglican worship today.

So what am I suggesting? I’m wondering about the value of adopting a version of the old Anglican Sunday service, and specifically emphasizing a service of Scripture and preaching as the service for all – that is, the old-Ante-Communion – with Communion proper as something for committed and prepared Christians only. This would be instead of the current Sunday morning diet of multiple services of the Eucharist, sorted by liturgical and musical preference (and, not infrequently, length). Ideally, one would begin with morning prayer using the daily office lectionary and the litany, for the clergy and other worship leaders as well as anyone who would like to begin their Sundays with additional psalmody, Scripture, and prayers. Then, the single largest service by attendance would be the Ante-Communion, with its emphasis on hearing the Word proclaimed and preached and then responding to the Word by offering gifts (the offertory) and prayers. It would be very possible to do a longer sermon than typical 12 min. Anglican fare and still have this portion of the service last an hour or even less. Then, at the conclusion of the Ante-Communion, those who have prepared to receive Communion would be invited to ‘draw near with faith’ and come into the chancel for the Lord’s Supper proper; those who do not feel so prepared would be dismissed to go about their day.

I wonder if such a schedule, with the old Ante-Communion at its heart, might help us address four related issues for contemporary Anglican worship in increasingly secular, post-Christian societies: (1) a lack of regular Communion preparation among even regular churchgoers, (2) low levels of regular prayer and Scripture reading among our people, (3) generally poor Christian formation among even regular churchgoers, and (4) a worry how our services function for curious non-Christians.

Addressing the Lack of Communion Preparation

For (1), I’ve already talked a bit about how the twentieth century saw the collapse of traditional practices of communion preparation; feel free to see this Substack for a longer treatment. In short, until not very long ago, there was an essentially universal expectation across Christian churches – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant – that communicants would engage in some form or another of Communion preparation before coming to the table. This expectation is still de jure held by most churches even today; the catechism in the 1979 BCP says that in order to come to the Eucharist, “it is required that we should examine our lives, repent of our sins, and be in love and charity with all people.” But in practice, there is very little teaching around how to prepare for communion in our churches and I strongly suspect that as a result, many people do not do it on their own – not because they are impious, but simply because they have not been shown how! In Eastertide, the season in which I am writing this Substack, it is not uncommon in some Episcopal/Anglican churches to remove the Confession of Sin from the Eucharist, so that even this minimal form of preparation is excluded. And all this despite St Paul’s clear instructions that we prepare ourselves before coming to the Lord’s Table, and his warnings of the dire consequences of failure in this regard (see 1 Cor. 11:27-32)!

I wonder if a separation between Ante-Communion and the Communion proper might make it easier to encourage a more robust culture of communion preparation, might make it more normal to decline to receive if one does not feel ready to do so (anecdotally, I have been nearly yanked out of my pew by very well-meaning ushers who, in their desire to make it clear that I was welcome to receive, nearly forced me to the altar). To be sure, there is a danger in the opposite direction, of discussing Eucharistic preparation in a way that renders communion a reward to be earned by moral action or makes people afraid to receive God’s good gift. But while it is something to be aware of, I think good teaching could reduce the worry – and frankly, our tendency now is so far in the opposite direction that our church debates whether you even need to be a Christian to receive communion!

Modeling Daily Prayer and Scripture Reading

As for (2), I’ve written about our discipleship crisis before (see here) but will summarize by noting that on surveys of spiritual life, mainliners consistently show much, much lower levels of involvement in basic spiritual disciplines than evangelicals or black Protestants. I have no illusions that the simple act of offering morning prayer on Sunday mornings will fix this, but I do wonder if modelling and teaching how to pray morning prayer within the context of Sunday worship might help people see that it is both rewarding and very doable! Ideally of course every church would be offering morning and evening prayer daily, giving people plenty of opportunities to pray together and teaching them how to do so when they cannot participate in public daily prayer! But doing it on Sundays might be a good place to start. I could imagine suggesting (though not requiring) that people make public morning prayer part of their communion preparation on Sundays when they intend to commune as a way of encouraging them to try it out.

Strengthening Knowledge of the Faith

For (3), then, it a common clerical complaint that there is a real lack of knowledge of the basics of the Christian faith both in our congregations and in our culture writ large. We cannot expect that people from secular backgrounds who are curious about the faith have any real knowledge of Christianity, as perhaps we once could a generation or two ago. More troublingly, this is often true in our congregations as well! I have been surprised and disturbed over the course of my ministry to find people who have been lifelong, devoted churchgoers yet rather confused ideas about the basics of Christian belief. I hasten to add that once again I blame us clergy more than anyone else for this; if we have failed to teach our people the basics of the faith or conveyed that such knowledge is important, a general lack of knowledge is small surprise! Indeed, I’ve run Christian education groups around the creeds and had people tell me that they were so thankful to have the opportunity for the chance think seriously about these basics of the Christian faith for the first time since confirmation 60 years ago!

Here, the scheme I’m providing is, once again, hardly a silver-bullet solution, but I think it might help. It might help by allowing a somewhat longer sermon than typical mainline preaching and, perhaps just as important, encourage our clergy to take the sermon more seriously as a central part of the service. As far as length goes, I find that sometimes 12 minutes just isn’t long enough for a teaching-heavy persuasive sermon that seeks to model good Scriptural exegesis. Now, I’m not calling for 18^th-c. style hour long sermons! And to be sure, not every sermon needs to be primarily doctrinal, and it is certainly a mistake to expect sermons to do all our Christian education for us. But realistically, we can expect that more people will hear our sermons than will attend our other Christian education events, and so treating sermons as mere brief reflections on Scripture leading us to the real high point – the Eucharist – does our people a real disservice. Even 15 or 20 minutes would allow much more substantive teaching and proclamation.

And more broadly, I would love our church to recover a higher view of preaching as a form of persuasive address that seeks to move people to repentance and new life through the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, and perhaps even (with much of the Reformed tradition) as a form of the Word of God. I worry that our emphasis that Sunday worship is the Eucharist leads to our clergy conceptualizing themselves as ritual technicians rather than preachers of the Word – and thus contributes to, in a word, the rather dismal state of modern mainline Anglican preaching. And it seems to me that my proposal might, insofar as it treats the Ante-Communion as a coherent service which for some people will comprise the full extent of their Sunday morning worship, as it were, force our clergy into a somewhat higher view of preaching rather than just seeing it as a mere prolegomenon to the Eucharist.

Maximizing Welcome & Minimizing Awkwardness for Visitors

Finally, for (4), I think there is a real desire in our church at present to be welcoming and approachable to newcomers and an anxiety that we often aren’t. One of the clearest ways this is expressed is in various schemes to welcome the unbaptized to communion. While I think that communion without baptism is entirely wrongheaded, I think that the desire to think about what our worship conveys to newcomers is a good one, and I too worry about how welcoming we are.

I wonder if structuring communion as something for those who have specifically prepared for it (rather than assuming that all will receive) and dismissing all those (unbaptized or not) who will not commune might help here. First of all, it could help in reducing whatever discomfort or awkwardness unbaptized newcomers feel about what they should do come communion time. In my experience anyway, a lack of clarity about what unbaptized visitors should do is more difficult and alienating than the actual practice of excluding them from the Table. Here, with the modern recovery I’m proposing of the (very ancient) call for catechumens to depart, it would be clear: you are free to go! Moreover, because all those unprepared to receive, not just visitors, would be departing, it wouldn’t make such visitors conspicuous in the way that remaining in the pews when everyone else is going up to commune often does. Furthermore, we know that when people are visiting churches, one of the things that they most often focus on is the sermon; the way that this proposal would elevate the importance of the sermon would, in fact, conform us more closely to what we know most people expect and want when visiting a church for the first time.

Now, as I’ve said repeatedly in this very Substack, I want to resist any idea that the solution to our problems of Christian formation or evangelism is a liturgical fix. It’s not that I think bringing back a normative Sunday service of Morning Prayer, Litany, Ante-Communion, with Communion only for those prepared and the rest dismissed, would solve all of modern Anglicanism’s ills. But I do think that making the largest Sunday service one of the Word proclaimed and preached and responded to in offering and prayer, preceded by Morning Prayer and followed by the Communion for those prepared, has some real advantages in an increasingly post-Christian moment. Such a liturgical approach, alongside commitment to strong, Biblical, Gospel-centered preaching, to evangelism, to teaching and modeling Christian formation and discipleship, might both be more welcoming to newcomers and provide scaffolding to help long-time Christians deepen their life in Christ. We might, then, give two cheers for the Ante-Communion – for this decidedly underappreciated part of the Anglican past may provide a useful model for Anglican worship today!